Here are some different quotes that have at least something to do with religion, whether it is supporting it or slamming it.
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence.
-- Bertrand Russell
A myth is a religion in which no one any longer believes.
-- James Feibleman, Understanding Philosophy,
1973
God instructs the heart, not by ideas, but by pains and contradictions.
-- De Caussade
Russia has abolished God, but so far God has been more tolerant.
-- John Cameron Swayze
A priest advised Voltaire on his death bed to renounce the devil. Replied Voltaire, This is no time to make new enemies.
Once there lived a village of creatures along the bottom of a great
crystal river. Each creature in its own manner clung tightly to the twigs
and rocks of the river bottom, for clinging was their way of life, and
resisting the current what each had learned from birth. But one creature
said at last, 'I trust that the current knows where it is going. I shall
let go, and let it take me where it will. Clinging, I shall die of boredom.'
-- Richard Bach
The other creatures laughed and said, 'Fool! Let go, and that current
you worship will throw you tumbled and smashed across the rocks, and you will
die quicker than boredom!'
But the one heeded them not, and taking a breath did let go, and at
once was tumbled and smashed by the current across the rocks. Yet, in time,
as the creature refused to cling again, the current lifted him free from the
bottom, and he was bruised and hurt no more.
And the creatures downstream, to whom he was a stranger, cried, 'See
a miracle! A creature like ourselves, yet he flies! See the Messiah, come
to save us all!' And the one carried in the current said, 'I am no more
Messiah than you. The river delight to lift us free, if only we dare let go.
Our true work is this voyage, this adventure.'
But they cried the more, 'Saviour!' all the while clinging to the
rocks, making legends of a Saviour.
The price of seeking to force our beliefs on others is that someday they might force their beliefs on us.
-- Mario Cuomo
Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven; confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
If only God would give me some clear sign! Like making a large deposit in my name in a swiss bank.
-- Woody Allen
Why do they put the Gideon Bibles only in the bedrooms, where it's usually too late, and not in the barroom downstairs?
-- Christopher Morley
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.
-- Sigmund Freud
The assumed instinctive belief in God has been used by many persons as an argument for His existence. But this is a rash argument, as we should thus be compelled to believe in the existence of cruel and malignant spirits, only a little more powerful than man; for the belief in them is far more general than in a beneficent Diety.
-- Charles Robert Darwin
What are the 7 deadly sins of Christianity? Gluttony, avarice, sloth, lust... They are urges every man feels at least once a day. How could you set yourself up as the most powerful institution on earth? You first find out what every man feels at least once a day, establish that as a sin, and set yourself up as the only institution capable of pardoning that sin.
-- Anton LaVey
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
-- Clive Staples Lewis
Religion is a bandage that man has invented to protect a soul made bloody by circumstance.
-- Theodore Herman Albert
Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessites.
-- Sigmund Freud
Man is a being born to believe. And if no church comes forward with its title-deeds of truth to guide him, he will find altars and idols in his own heart and his own imagination.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
Our quaint metaphysical opinions, in an hour of anguish, are like playthings by the bedside of a child deathly sick.
-- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.
-- Sigmund Freud
To be conscious that you are ignorant is a great step to knowledge.
-- Benjamin Disraeli
The Church says the Earth is flat. But I know that it is round. For I have seen the shadow on the Moon. And I have more faith in a shadow than in the Church.
-- Magellan
So long as man remains free he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find something to worship...[W]hat is essential is that all may be together in it. The craving for community worship is the chief misery of...all humanity. For the sake of common worship they've slain each other with the sword.
-- Feodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky
For Scripture is the school of the Holy Spirit, in which, as nothing is omitted that is both necessary and useful to know, so nothing is taught but what is expedient to know. Therefore we must guard against depriving believers of anything disclosed about predestination in Scripture, lest we seem either wickedly to defraud them of the blessing of their God or to accuse and scoff at the Holy Spirit for having published what it is in any way profitable to suppress.
-- John Calvin
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
-- Douglas Adams
Men are doubtful and skeptical about the Church; they suspect and dislike the clergy: they are impatient of theological systems; but for Jesus Christ, as he stand out to view in the sacred pages, as they dimly realize him in their own best selves, as they catch faint traces of him in the lives of his saints, they have no other sentiments than those of respect and affection.
-- Herbert Hensley Henson
Going to church no more makes you a christian than sleeping in your garage makes you a car.
-- Garrison Keiler
I'm often amazed at the way politicians -who spend hours poring over opinion poll results in a desperate attempt to discover what the public thinks- are certain they know precisely what God's views are on everything.
-- Simon Hoggart, The Guardian, Saturday 27 June 1998